From China to Amazon, NVIDIA’s Tesla is on a roll

NVIDIA's Tesla is on a roll, with two high-profile victories announced on …

This week brings two major pieces of news for NVIDIA, both of which are evidence that the GPU maker is killin' it in the high-performance computing (HPC) space. First is the latest Top 500 Supercomputer List, which sees China's NVIDIA-powered Tianhe-1A vault past the US Department of Energy's Jaguar machine to the top of the list.

China's 2.57-petaflop beast is powered by a combination of Intel Xeon (Westmere-EP) CPUs and over 7,000 NVIDIA GPUs. It runs Linux, and uses a proprietary interconnect to glue the nodes together. The DOE's Opteron-based Jaguar isn't too far behind, though, at 2.33 petaflops; if the DOE added GPU coprocessors to the system, it could easily retake the top spot. The Chinese also hold the number 3 spot on the list, with another Westmere-EP-based system that uses an earlier version of NVIDIA's Tesla for a coprocessor. Japan comes in fourth with another Westmere-EP/NVIDIA combo, followed by another GPU-less, Opteron-based Cray system at the DOE.

One player that has definitely lost ground in the Top 10 is IBM, which has hardware (Cell) in only the number 7 slot this time around.

Most of the attention surrounding this latest list is about the fact that China has taken the HPC crown from the US. This is true as far as it goes, but it might be more significant if it weren't for the fact that Intel and NVIDIA are the two companies that supplied the silicon for China's winner, and both are, of course, based in the US. The only thing this says about China is that they have giant pile of US dollars that they can send back to us in exchange for some of our computer hardware—maybe if they built a few thousand more of these machines a quarter, they might put a dent in our trade deficit. Other than that it's hard to see the fact that they essentially bought a large supercomputer from us as a sign of anything other than the US's continued (though still imperiled) technology leadership. In other words, call us when a machine based on one of the domestically designed Chinese CPUs makes its way into the Top 10.

The one other possibly significant China-related twist to this story is that the US lifted some of its high-tech export restrictions just last summer. Back in the early part of the decade, there was a lot of talk of Japanese limitations on exports of the PlayStation 2, for fear that a competitor like China might gang together a bunch of them into a supercomputer for military use. The US had similar controls in place, but these controls have steadily been lifted over the past few years. And now we have China knocking us off the top of the supercomputer list.

But ultimately, the real story here is that NVIDIA's bet on Tesla is really paying off. NVIDIA was the first to take the HPC potential of the GPU seriously, and they've invested considerable resources into winning this market in both hardware and software. Intel and AMD would both love to be competitive here with a data-parallel coprocessor, but right now NVIDIA owns this growing market. The Chinese system uses a derivative of NVIDIA's Fermi architecture, which is well-suited to exactly this sort of application.

Amazon goes Tesla

The second big NVIDIA announcement of the day came from Amazon, which is adding a GPU instance option to EC2. Called "Cluster GPU Instances," the new node type will give you two Fermi M2050 GPUs and two Nehalem Xeons. There's a page up with details, and the specs for the new instances are as follows: